Published: April 19, 2012 at 9:10 am

Who would be Crazy Enough to Buy Best Buy? (Daily Finance)
Tire-kickers always seem to gather around troubled companies with falling share prices.
Minneapolis’ Star Tribune — Best Buy’s (NYS: BBY) hometown newspaper – is positioning the beleaguered consumer electronics retailer as a buyout candidate.
“The Minnesota-based retail giant has become an alluring target for a private takeover, according to industry sources,” this morning’s article reads. “Best Buy’s stock price has lost more than half of its value, making an acquisition less expensive to a potential buyer.”
Don’t bet on it.

Here’s The Main Strategy Bridgewater Used To Make Money For Customers When It First Started Out (BusinessInsider)
Today, on Bloomberg TV’s ‘Money Moves’, host Deirdre Bolton sat down with Bob Rice of Tangent Capital Partners for a segment called ‘Bob’s Buzz Words.’ The term of the day was ‘overlay’ and Rice especially focused on what that means in the hedge fund world. If you’ve never heard of it before, in brief, it’s when you design a new group of investments to compliment a group of investments you already had — either to reduce that initial group’s risk, or to juice them up a bit.

Chase Coleman Continues Form That Returned Him To Rich List(Institutional Investor)
Last month Chase Coleman returned to AR’s Rich List of the highest-earning hedge fund managers after a three-year absence.
And his fund, Tiger Global, has continued the form that got him there, generating gains of roughly 3.7 percent in January, 3.8 percent in February and 5.1 percent in March. Last year the long-short specialist was the top-performing hedge fund manager with a 45 percent gain, enabling him to earn $550 million from fees and gains on his own capital. Coleman continued to rack up huge gains from big bets on Internet stocks.

Capital Group’s Gordon Crawford to Retire at Year’s End (BloomBerg)
Gordon Crawford, the fund manager whose views helped shape media industry mergers and acquisitions, will retire at year’s end after more than four decades at Los Angeles-based Capital Group Cos. Crawford, 65, told the company of his plans last year and the assets he oversees will gradually be handed to other managers at the firm, Chuck Freadhoff, a spokesman for Capital Group, said in a telephone interview. “Mr. Crawford told me his plans include playing more golf and spending time with his grandkids,” Freadhoff said. “This is a retirement.”

BlackRock Shares Fall as Fink Says Investor Fears Remain (BusinessWeek)
Laurence D. Fink, who has been advising investors to put more money in stocks, said clients are still overwhelmed by fear as global markets remain “fragile” despite the first-quarter rally. BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, fell by the most in four months as Fink said investors remain pessimistic and customers removed money from active equity products while turning to passive investments such as exchange-traded funds. BlackRock’s share of fees from active stock funds, which last year were the biggest contributor to investment advisory revenue, fell below stock ETFs this year as investors migrated to passive products.

Find out if High Frequency Traders are Killing Wall Street at The Speed Traders Workshop 2012 Warsaw (PRUrgent)

David Levine wrote in The Huffington Post that high frequency traders are increasingly replacing the traders in traditional stock exchange pits — those nervous-looking people in vests, furiously hand signaling buy and sell orders in a sort of rapid-fire sign language. But instead of huddling on the floor of an exchange, high-frequency traders sit at their computers tweaking and retweaking algorithms that do the buying and selling electronically far faster than any human can.

He added that the idea behind high-frequency trading (HFT, as it is known) is that if you can buy and sell stocks, bonds and derivatives at the speed of a supercomputer — literally executing trades by the millisecond — you can make money off each of the tiny little movements in price. Taken individually, each trade nets only a few pennies. But some high-frequency trading firms can trade as many as 100 million shares in a single day, according to Manoj Narang, who runs such a firm in New Jersey called Tradeworx. Those pennies add up.

George Soros’ new thinktank at Oxford Martin School and the IMF: How the eurozone can recover (PeriScopePost)
The name George Soros, in a news report, tends to attract attention, but it wasn’t just the legendary investor’s estimation in a recent Financial Times editorial that the eurozone had now entered a “more lethal phase” that stood out for me. It was the news that he is funding a new thinktank, the INET@Oxford, at the Oxford Martin School, so that it might, to quote The Guardian, “focus on the eurozone and global crises”.
With this in mind, I looked through the School’s website and read about Professor Thomas Homer-Dixon’s theory that the present times have the potential to be very disturbed. “Various material and social stresses are increasing around the planet,” he said. He also discussed his Z Plan for dealing with, rather than trying to prevent, the results of climate change, “a shift in our policy focus,” and explained that he is now in the process of applying his model to the issue of conflict and any global shocks that lie ahead. From my viewpoint, this was particularly relevant to social unrest and I thought this type of plan could serve as a preventative measure, like those on the environment.

Make a Difference to host investment conference (BizTimes)
The conference will feature Jim Chanos, founder and managing partner at short selling investment firm Kynikos Associates LP in New York. Chanos is renowned for identifying impending corporate financial disasters and short selling the shares for companies like Enron. He also predicted the global financial crisis and tried to warn financial leaders long before it happened.
Speakers also include Thomas Ognar, managing director and senior portfolio manager at Wells Capital Management, Joseph Frohna, founding principal and portfolio manager at 1492 Capital Management and Richard Imperiale, president and chief investment officer at Uniplan Investment Counsel.

Best Buy Shares Rise Amid Reports of Potential TakeOver(NYPost)
Best Buy shares rose nearly one percent Wednesday amid reports that private investors are circling the big box retailer.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune cited industry sources saying the troubled retailer has emerged as a potential takeover target.
It “is on a lot of people’s radar screens,” Jeremy Brunelli, a retail analyst with Consumer Edge Research was quoted as saying. “Best Buy is an obvious candidate. There’s a definite buzz going on,” he added.
The newspaper named New York-based Greenlight Capital as one potential suitor, without identifying its sources.

Ackman fund looking at $4 billion IPO: FT(Reuters)
Activist shareholder William Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital Management plans to raise $4 billion by listing a new fund in January 2013, the Financial Times reported. The fund, called Pershing Square Holdings, is likely to be listed on the London Stock Exchange or NYSE Euronext, the paper said, citing people that it didn’t identify.

Hedge Funds Piled Into Financials Last Quarter (Barron’s)
Hedge funds: We just can’t get enough of the financial sector.
Bank stocks’ strong first quarter was also a time when funds were gobbling up the sector, judging by new data from Credit Suisse’s (CS) Pankaj Patel. We won’t get a systematic look at big funds’ holdings until 45 days after the quarter, with federal 13F filings. But it looks like a great many managers weren’t deterred by John Paulson’s recent failure to replicate his post-financial crisis success in this area. By Patel’s data, pulled from the firm’s prime services group, financials enjoyed the biggest increase in hedge-fund portfolios of any sector, at 3.2%.

Third Point pushes Technicolor to sell licenses: report (Reuters)
U.S.-based activist hedge fund Third Point, which holds 5.3 percent of France’s Technicolor, is pushing the digital video specialist company to sell its licensing operation, Le Figaro reported on Thursday, citing unnamed sources. The newspaper also said that management of Technicolor, which is trying to turn the group around after several years of poor performance, was looking for new investors.

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